As an example, I remember having a conversation with someone IC a while ago where they said "Oh, I die all the time, that's why I carry a dozen raise dead scrolls with me".
I think the main issue people have atm is that cheap raise dead scrolls make death meaningless. Renaming the raise dead scroll into "Smelling Salts" which can bring back "unconscious" characters could probably fix that.

No one's arguing that it isn't.
The main issue is that people die waaay too much ICly, leading to awkward conversations and awkward rp when someone actually wants to rp a raise dead spell as it should be cast in pnp (using a diamond and so on).

IIRC, the creation of magic items that cast spells requires the material components to be expended as part of the creation of the item. A Diamond HAS been spent to make that scroll.

If someone is casting it from raw, sure they should be free to RP the full process. But honestly, making it cost will just drive people to respawn and that's far more disruptive to RP than cheap resurrections.

Oh yeah...and when a Level 30 "dies," they have a 1d4 Level reduction from Myrkul.

Wait, do what now?

I play this game and go do stuff to relax, and I hate grinding. I hate it with a burning passion, as do a lot of people I know. Both for xp and for the obscene amount of gold we need for most things here. If suddenly we're going to be losing levels upon death/respawn and raise items far more difficult to acquire, you're likely to see a lot of casual players stop participating in pretty much anything resembling higher end adventuring or simply evaporate from the server altogether. Especially if you put a gold cost on respawning overall for the simple reason there's NOWHERE to store your gold to minimize that loss, so if you slap a percentage gold loss on respawning, you're talking about people losing 1000s of gold in a go. Just not ok.

Want to make raise scrolls harder to come by? That's a thing, but really, outside of loot tables or paying the ONE NPC that sells them, you have to get them from players already. If you make a "smelling salts" replacement or something, make them stackable like the scrolls, because we already have enough inventory issues without bags on the server.

The game is there to be fun and relaxing, make it just a pain for half the populace, and you won't have much of that populace for long, they'll move on. A lot of the suggestions of making the raising functions expensive in the field or overall are things I've seen on very heavy RP or even hardcore perma-death servers, not so much on servers like BG. If you want to do it, then go ahead, just be aware that you might be cutting out a significant amount of folk who just want to play a game and not worry about resources and such all the time.

Derik Ranloss: Thugging for GREAT JUSTICE!!!Deputy Headmaster, Bladestone Foundation.
Proprietor, The Last Anchor

How, if any, aspects of this game/PW make the leveling/experience part truly challenging anymore?

Perhaps if you are a brand newb player, you stumble plenty into too-high-CR areas and get killed. But a Player wises up quick, and no matter the Character Sheet stats, wont repeat dumb moves.

Thus, dying, or should we say the act of not really dying because of 1. Easy/soft XP penalty; 2. Ease of Rez./Raise Dead radically defines the gameplay, which is one of Death Means Nothing.

Yes, there are some Players who go out of their way to treat dying IC and meaningful, but come on...so many DONT...and not only don’t, it is RP’d as “...it ain’t no thang...” and simply lessens the quality of the experience of the game...for many.

I also believe that if Deah/dying/getting to live on... was made a greater challenge and choices that Players make in RP for their toons had greater consequence, that a more dedicated and more intense RP experience would exist for BGTSCC.

No one wants to see their investment die, so they act/RP appropriately to stay alive.

No one wants to squander their RL time investment into their PC and Experience gained, so they act/RP in a way to protect against loss.

There is a grand quality to survival, and if the means of such are so plentiful and without any challenge to acquire or keep, it ends up belittling survival, in the end.

But hey, if the majority want it, fine! Immortality and essential invincibility has a nice ring to it...and I do enjoy smirking when someone RPs the poor suffering they have experienced....and I get to RP back: “Oh, just go suck on a Heal potion!”

Personally, it’s not my interest to feign it. I’d rather the challenge be real.

EDIT: with a greater challenge/difficulty there must also be greater rewards!!!!

No one's arguing that it isn't.
The main issue is that people die waaay too much ICly, leading to awkward conversations and awkward rp when someone actually wants to rp a raise dead spell as it should be cast in pnp (using a diamond and so on).

I think that is an issue with suspension of disbelief. Maybe this is a setting where death doesn't have as much meaning. I mean, Dark Souls in lore was pretty similar (many people being undead and all), coming back from the dead was pretty ordinary and it didn't cheapen that setting. Granted, there was hollowing but there were also items to reverse hollowing. There are other games like The Secret World, where the protagonists are explicitly immortal and it works really well for the story.

It doesn't have to cheapen the setting. You need to spend some effort to work it into the setting, though. This is one of the reasons d&d has trouble translating to a standardized video game if people aren't willing to help it bend to the video game medium.

D&D is made to be customizable. So customize it into a good video game format. Maybe death works differently for adventurers (PCs) than other characters. Use a little imagination, don't just stare at it at face value if the answer is dissatisfying.

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Maybe death penalties could be introduced from death, like curses or stat drains. Yeah sure, they are easy to recover from if you have a player who can cast the appropriate spells or have the items handy. But until you do recover from them, they represent an injury that needs to be repaired. That would add a little weight to it, for sure. Play your character sheet, after all.

Any sort of penalty would work. It would also inhibit mid-battle resurrections FAR better than the idiotic channelling mechanic would (which is the only foreseeable reason that abomination would exist). You die, and you get a random curse, stat drain, some level drain, whatever. Maybe even blindness, deafness, or silence. It could be randomly rolled to choose 1-3 penalties upon resurrection. Then you need to seek a restoration to repair yourself. Boom, you need a cleric or you need to pay an NPC (not sure if NPCs can restore negative levels).

An NPC -should- be able to do it, accessibility is important to this server. It has always been its strength. Sometimes, you just can't find a cleric PC. No one wants to be stuck with stat drains until reset. Maybe make the cost 2k for a greater restoration or somesuch from an NPC priest.

That would also be far more interesting than a simple gold cost (aka more grinding) imo.

Renaming the raise dead scroll into "Smelling Salts" which can bring back "unconscious" characters could probably fix that.

To be honest, I've been of the same idea for a very long while.

I've had the below item for some time—someone went to a lot of typing trouble, LOL, to make a "point." I think I've been carrying this for...3 years now? I had 2 actually, but recently used one when my Crusader rescued a damsel-bard in serious distress in the Cloakwood Forest. *smiley for Paladin Points gained*

I am in total disagreement with adding more restrictions to the game.
but if this were to be a thing with a gold cost i think it would be better to actually have a diamond or other gem to be sacrificed alongside the
scroll/spell as a material component to use rather than gold.
this could apply to raise dead, resurrection, teleport, maybe a couple of other spells to take away the cheapness of magic.
However i would also argue that forgotten realms is also a high magic setting.